Castaway/PSP Version 003 Released (Atari ST Emulator)

September 6th, 2005, 21:37 Posted By: wraggster

Skeezix has posted a new release in our PSP Emulation and Homebrew forum of his excellent Atari ST emulator for the PSP, heres whats new:

Tonnes of additions.. its really pulling together, and most anything you'd want is now present. Just need to fill in a few more little things, maybe flesh out the menu navigation options a bit, and add some config files.. but all the main goods like savestates and loadstates are all present now!

Alpha 003
---------
NEW: While emulation is running, hit [START] to bring up runtime options
o Disk Management -- lets you eject and insert a different floppy(s)
o Reset menu works -- lets you exit the emulator entirely, or do a
warm reset on the ST (ie: Try inserting some disks, then hitting
reset, and voila.. no need to exit emulator to swap disks.)
CHG: Turned brightness up a notch (shifted colour palette decoding)
o Med res and low res both
CHG: On-screen keyboard
o The 'selection' is alpha blended to darken the key; nicer than blacking
it out
o The keyboard itself will fade in and out rather than just toggling on
and off when you hit the [select] button
NEW: In addition to .ST disks, .MSA format disks are all supported; further,
either kind of disk can be in a .zip file and work fine. (As long as thats
the only file in the .zip) -- some .ST's will compress from 800k to 200k
in a zip file, so it could be worth it.
NEW: Added simple intro-screen so you know what version is coming up
NEW: Disk picker changes
o When you hit () to pick a disk, it'll ask you if you'd like to insert
it into drive A, or B, look it up in the database, or delete it.
o Insert into A, B, and delete now work
o Disk picker now allows you to have many disks -- it'll scroll; no more
than about a thousand disks for now (It shows .ST, .MSA, .ZIP and
.SS files)
o If no disk is chosen (like you hit X to many times), it'll warn you so
you know why nothing really exciting is going on
FIX: The mouse should work nicely; in 001/002 it might sometimes just not
work at all, but I've tried it in no-disks, and Dungeon Master and others
FIX: The key release and press mechanism has been fixed up a bit; when you
use the on-screen keyboard to press a key, it should get held down for
1/6th second and then released. If this is not sufficient, let me know
and I can increase its duration.. but that should be plenty.
NEW: Savestates/loadstates - you can now save a snapshot to SD card and
load it up later; far more useful than in-game-saving, and faster.
o Build a crude keyboard based interface to typing in a filename for SD card
o Savestate
- you name a filen "aaaa" and the emu compresses the system RAM (etc)
into a zipped file "aaaa.ss" (.ss denotes savestate)
o Loadstate (from the normal disk picker menu)
- pick a .ss file in the disk picker (as if it was any other disk); a
"load now" or "delete" menu will appear, so you can fire up the state
or just delete it
o Seems to work; I saved out a xenon2 savestate and loaded her back up;
use this to circumvent multi-disk or long loadtimes (Civilization and
Dungeon Master, I'm looking at you!)
NEW: Check for existance of TOS.ROM; if missing, show warning.
NEW: Games database
o When you pick a .msa, .st or .zip, it'll offer to insert it into the
drives; another option is to "look it up in the database", which calculates
a CRC on the disk and looks it up in a special database the GP32 users
helped create. If the CRC is found, a listing of games on that known
disk is shown.. otherwise, an error shows that its not in the database.

I hope you dig it!

Let me know what you think

jeff


Download Here --> http://psp-news.dcemu.co.uk/castawaypsp.shtml

Please leave your thanks/bug reports & compatibility here --> http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=10352

Thanks to Skeezix himself for posting the news on the forums and telling me on IRC about the new release

Update- i added a v1.00 eboot for those with v1.00 PSPs like moi

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